Campus Operations

Climate Action Plan

In Spring 2007, then-President Peggy R. Williams signed the American College and University President's Climate Commitment, pledging Ithaca College to the task of developing a strategy and long-range plan to achieve "carbon neutrality" at some point in the future. President Williams named Vice President for Finance and Administration Carl Sgreccias chair of the Presidents Climate Commitment Committee and convened a campus-wide representive committee of students, faculty, staff and administrators to develop our Climate Action Plan.

In 2009, the Ithaca College Board of Trustees approved the Ithaca College Climate Action Plan, which calls for 100% carbon neutrality by 2050 and offers a 40-year action plan to work toward that ambitious goal. While many of the strategies to reduce our annual greenhouse gas emissions were already underway before we even developed our long-range Climate Action Plan, we formally implemented our plan in Fiscal Year 2010-2011.

The original Presidents Climate Commitment plan development committee subsequently "morphed" into a Steering Committee and four implementation teams focused on Facilities, Transportation, Resource and Environmental Management Program (REMP), and Education.

Complete transparency is a key element of our Climate Action Plan development and implementation. We pledged to make available our annual greenhouse gas emissions inventories, which can be found on the Ithaca College reporting section of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment website. We also have complied with providing progress reports at each stage and each year, as our annual greenhouse gas emissions inventory is updated (an ongoing student research project), we post those latest inventories to that site. Our annual emissions inventory is the measuring stick we use to chart our progress toward meeting our goal.

We also have developed other internal progress reports and informational documents about our Climate Action Plan which may be useful.

We invite you to learn more about our shared Climate Action Plan and how YOU can support our efforts to become "carbon neutral". It will require all members of our campus community to be aware and fully supportive of our efforts in order for Ithaca College to achieve this goal.